veltheriafandomcom-20200214-history
Legacy
Legacy is the most recent voidship to have been built, having been officially commissioned in AH 522, after a nearly fifty-year design and construction process. Owing to the various systems that comprise it, most of which have undergone dramatic redesigning to render them fit for Legacy's mission, the ship is regarded as the single most thaumatically advanced construct Veltheria has ever created. Construction and launch Following the discovery of the Keystone of the Wyrd in AH 468, and the subsequent decision to build a vessel which could explore entirely different realities, the design process for Legacy began. While the principles underlying voidships had been understood for two centuries, challenges soon became apparent. For one thing, no Infinium was yet capable of generating a void shell which could render its contents functionally nonexistent. The chassis and hulls were constructed by AH 475, in the shipyard on Triton. The ship was designed for missions up to six months in length, with a crew compliment of 16 (including Seekers) and an emergency capacity of 45. Externally the vessel has a beam of 100 metres and measures 120 metres from bow to stern, though internally its dimensions are somewhat larger, with the decks having been installed in a partly isolated demiplane. By convention, Veltherian vessels are not given names until their means of propulsion are installed, and so for the next 47 years the ship was referred to as 'ten-ninety' after its official designation Project V-Indigo-1090. The ship's thaumatic systems were installed over this period, though almost all of them were replaced or upgraded at least once between the day they were installed and the day the ship was commissioned. Following the installation of the ship's Infinium in AH 522, the Academy of Void Exploration formally commissioned the ship with the name Legacy, and appointed Prefect Solin to command the mission (Solin had been at the head of the selection committee for the ship's crew). The ship's official launch came two months later, in early 523, with a shakedown cruise of nearby solar systems and a two-day excursion into the Aether. Ship systems Executive Legacy's two nodes of command are the main bridge and the drive bay. The main bridge hosts the commander and most of the ship's chief officers. Legacy has a crew of only 12 (not including the Seekers), and so the main bridge has enough space for all of the crew to occupy it at once. All executive functions are ultimately available through the commander's chair, accessible only using the Command Stylus. All ship systems are operable autonomously via Legacy's eidolon, and indeed on Legacy even executive functions are run through it, making the ship itself a part of the crew. Secondary command is available through the drive bay, which features the eidolon's physical systems, as well as the Infinium and the aether-drive engines. Nautical Uniquely among voidships, Legacy is designed for planetary landing and take-off. It boasts the most powerful aether-drive ever imagined, capable of sustaining 12 km/s for twenty full minutes. This is more than enough to escape an earthlike planet in ideal conditions. Its cruising speed is 4.5 km/s. Legacy's Infinium has been designed to work in tandem with a device called the Crucible (see below). Though as yet untested, the purpose of the Crucible is to provide ipseity information to the Infinium, acting as a navigational plotting tool. Analytical The ship's divination systems are highly sophisticated, able to detect arcane fluctuations as well as the interactions of other planes of reality. The ship's detectors provide various readings to its systems, both for general purposes and to Legacy's research suite. The most iconic of any voidship's research facilities is likely the observatory, a holographic environment where information from the divination systems can be used to render a realtime replica of the ship's surroundings. As well as external divination, an advanced (albeit compact) laboratory provides a varied array of tools for analysing divination results and examining (and safely containing) any samples brought on board. Tactical Legacy's primary defensive measure is its thaumic shield, which operates in numerous arcs and protects the outer hull from direct damage. The shields operate in six arcs around the ship: port, starboard, fore, aft, dorsal and ventral. The displacement shroud reduces the ability of others to target the ship, and is effective against both living assailants and automatic targeting systems. This is ineffective against instantaneous weaponry, such as arcane ray attacks or technological beam attacks, but highly effective against physical projectiles, which require either tracking or calculated aim. Legacy's active defence, more commonly used against incoming bodies such as asteroids, is the kinetic beam, which is used either to repel foreign bodies or otherwise control their movement. Crew Support Legacy is not designed as a pleasurecraft, and given the determination that missions should not be longer than half a year, provision is made for basic comfort but little in the way of luxury. There exist a number of expansion bays, and conversion kits for creating more plush diplomatic quarters, should the need arise. One nod to luxury is that the low crew complement allows for every crewmember to be assigned private quarters, including hygiene facilities. A communal mess hall serves as the crew meeting room. An infirmary with capacity for four critical patients as well as a small medical laboratory. To compensate for the small infirmary, the private beds in all crew quarters are equipped with medical monitors for use by the ship's physicians. Life support is provided by a simple lodestone-powered system, cycling the air and allowing refined control of temperature and humidity throughout the ship. The system can sustain life support for around 50 people in an emergency. Auxillary Craft Legacy's interior is a discrete demiplanar realm, meaning that embarkation and disembarkation must be done through personal translocation. This includes boarding the single auxillary craft, which is affixed to the outer hull of the ship. In situations where direct translocation or landing are undesirable or impossible, a single longboat is provided, with space for half a dozen crew. It possesses light shielding and a rudimentary aether-drive. The longboat possesses no spatial compression features, and its interior is contiguous with its exterior. It can only sustain life support for six personnel for longer than a few hours. Innovations Legacy's Infinium works on the same underlying principles as any other, however the unique challenge for the Legacy mission was to create one which could grant the void shell's outer surface with different ipseity than that of the surrounding universe. Since ipseity is the property of belonging to a universe as opposed to not belonging to it, this means the void shell would have to render its inner contents nonexistent. Though the device is called an Infinium because it generates a void shell (and is capable of ordinary void travel), at its core are mechanisms and thaumatics which would be unrecognisable to most technicians capable of understanding an Infinium. With the problem of generating the correct kind of void shell solved, a new problem became apparent: measuring ipseity. The problem is roughly analogous to searching for red objects in a room flooded with red light, only having another red light to search by; the ipseity of another universe cannot conventionally be known, since it is a property which by definition is impossible for anything within the one from which the measurement is taken. The solution to this problem proved to be the only issue that posed a serious threat to the continuation of the Legacy mission, since philosophers realised that only the Keystones, through the song of Maua, could make contact with other universes. In short, they would need to be on board Legacy, to provide the 'navigational' information for the Infinium. Though controversial, eventually the matter was resolved, and a device called the Crucible was engineered to allow the Keystones to journey safely in the ship while also being joined with the ship's systems. To protect the crew against the effects of being fully exposed to an alien reality, as well as certain environmental dangers, the Seeker team are equipped with Harnesses of Adaptation. These provide magical protection against toxic atmospheres as well as extremes of temperature and pressure, but there are limits to all of these protections. The ipseity-adaptation effect is achieved by a constant sympathetic mandate from the Infinium. Known crew * Solin, commander of the Legacy; * Alexos Zenaka, the vice-commander; * Samford Cartwright, Legacy's chief astronomer; * The Seekers ** Dr Thessaly Lanza; ** Melody; ** Tecuhuacatli; ** Dr Mythara Vance